Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. These firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs or to introduce new features, or both.
There is a problem with managing the millions of devices that need firmware upgrades and the provisioning of applications. There is a problem in determining the existing firmware version of devices and mapping them to device capabilities. In some deployments, it is often not clear what the end points are, and providing end-to-end security is often not possible. Servers are often subject to replay attacks. Security systems need to be able to guard against replay attacks, etc.
In general, more than management server may wish to manage the mobile device. How these management servers can manage the mobile device when there is only one management tree to be managed in the device is a fundamental problem. Access control lists (ACLs) are expected to be the means by which a primary management server can provide access to parts of a management tree to other management servers. However, if more than one management server is to be a primary management server, there is problem of deciding which one of these should own the rights to manage the root node.
In general, having one management tree and a plurality of management servers that need to manage information on the tree makes it difficult and complicated to manage access rights. This problem is exacerbated when each management server decides of provision different set of credentials in the mobile device.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.